The first-round results of the French parliamentary election, called by Emmanuel Macron to try and stem the rise of the right-wing Rassemblement National, have turned into a watershed moment of a very different sort: Marine Le Pen’s party has scooped 33.5 per cent of the vote, and first place. It might (might) secure enough second-round support for an overall majority.
RN’s rise hasn’t come out of nowhere; Le Pen has come second in the last two presidential races, in 2017 and 2022 – the former under the party’s old name, Front National.
But this result is testament both to deep changes in French politics since 2022, when Le Pen’s father first reached the second round but took less than 18 per cent of the vote, and to the work that his daughter and others have put into remaking his fringe party into something which ten and a half million French voters could cast their ballots for.
A few weeks ago, it looked as if the United Kingdom might have its own breakthrough moment for the hard Right, albeit on a smaller scale. Nigel Farage had decided to stand, the Conservative campaign was misfiring, and Reform UK achieved the psychologically important milestone of overtaking the Tories in an opinion poll.
Forecasters predicted it would enter Parliament with a clutch of seats, a couple put the total in double figures. The Clown Prince of Clacton looked set to loom over the subsequent Conservative leadership contest, with MPs and members alike divided over whether or not to try and reach an accommodation with him and his party.
What a difference a month makes. Reform UK may well pick up a few seats on Friday; one recent forecast as Farage taking Clacton and Lee Anderson seeing off Labour in Ashfield. That will give it a significant boost in terms of funding (Short Money takes into account a party’s national vote share, as well as its total seats) and provide a platform in Parliament.
But the real prize was the opportunity to disrupt, destabilise, or even destroy the Conservative Party at an historic moment of vulnerability, and it feels as if that is slipping away.
Reform’s grossly-mishandled campaign – the comments on Russia, to the racist and antisemitic candidates – has so toxified it and its leader that the cordon sanitaire between it and the Tories is now much stronger than it was a few weeks ago. Behind the scenes, I hear that leadership hopefuls are reassuring people that they will not be striking a deal; Suella Braverman, and others of the ‘unite the right’ persuasion, have gone very quiet.
This won’t bother Farage’s angriest supporters, who make no secret of wanting to see the Conservative Party smashed to pieces. But any realistic hope of permanently reshaping the British Right has always lain through accommodation with at least a substantial part of its long-dominant party.
In Canada, after the 1993 election in which the Progressive Conservatives were reduced to two seats (and the Reform Party entered Parliament with more than 50), it still took ten years, and two more elections in which the PCs placed fifth, for a merger to happen. Even in France, where the RN has simply out-competed the traditional Right, Le Pen agreed to 62 Republican candidates running on a nationalist coupon.
Farage used to understand two important things: that he was at his most effective when forcing or tempting the Conservative Party to react to him, and that essential to maintaining that influence was maintaining his party’s respectability – which, in the case of UKIP, he more or less did.
That not only allowed him to help secure the EU referendum, which has secured his position as one of the most important politicians of early 21st-century Britain, but also take UKIP to the cusp of a real breakthrough. At the 2015 election it came second in a hundred seats, and boasted a real beachhead in local government. Had the referendum not taken place, it would almost certainly have become a parliamentary force in 2019 or 2020.
We don’t yet know exactly how bad things are going to be on Friday morning. A totally catastrophic result may yet trigger a complete meltdown amongst the remaining Conservative MPs, and give Farage the space to cause trouble. There might be some defections over the course of the next parliament.
But as any fan of Jeremy Corbyn can tell you, the ability to pack out a rally is not a strong indicator of the ability to win power. There has always been a ceiling to full-fat Faragism – recall the inverse correlation between his prominence and the Leave voting intention during the referendum – but it is probably lower now than it has been in years, and the vector by which it might have secured more mainstream cover, a fractured Conservative Party, seems closed to it.
In the long run, historians may come to see this as what allowed the Tories the time and space to recover: Reform using up the space available to a right-wing challenger party but locking itself out of the mainstream.